Previews

Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

Insomniac invites you to take an exclusive look at Zordoom Prison, one of the many levels you'll find in Ratchet's next adventure.

Spiffy:

At its near-final state, a fun title that combines familiar gameplay with stellar HD-gen visuals.

Iffy:

Will it all be enough for some PS3 owners, who shunned the series on PS2, to warm up to this one?

Since its official unveiling at Sony's May press event, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction has become one of the hottest titles for the PlayStation 3's second holiday season. Between Insomniac's extensive experience with the franchise on PlayStation 2 and the technological know-how that the developer gained while working on launch title Resistance: Fall of Man, the title seems to be on its way to living up to the acclaim garnered by 2004's Up Your Arsenal.
We took another look at the game during Sony's European media event last week and saw the unveiling of the planet Raikan V. Then just yesterday we were treated to an exclusive look at Zordoom Prison when Greg Philips, Line Producer on ToD, came by to show off the title at our office. The game's over 90% complete at this point, and thus extremely playable.

From what we know of ToD's storyline, it will reveal some secrets that long-time fans of the series will find interesting. Some of the mysteries of the Lombax, Ratchet's alien race, will be revealed through the game's plot. Clank will also have some mysteries of his own to face, such as why he's seeing creatures that no one else can. Along the way, of course, you'll get to blow lots and lots of stuff up with a laundry list of big bad weapons, in true R&C tradition, as the duo take on Emperor Percival Tachyon, who aims to wipe out all the Lombax in the galaxy. According to SCEA, North American PS3 owners should be getting their hands on a demo of the game during the first week of October.

From a gameplay perspective, the action in ToD should feel very familiar to those who've put in their fair share on past installments of the series. The combination of platforming and shooting that has made the games a staple of Sony's first-party lineup is very much intact. The biggest differences that we've noticed at this point seem to lie in the upgradeability of weapons. You'll either be able to upgrade them through experience points or via Raritanium, which allows Ratchet to manually make custom tweaks to whatever guns you're getting the most use out of. We've discussed many of the weapons, from the Groovitron (which, thanks to licensing issues, has songs that seem like what you think they might be, but they're not), to the Gelatinator, which shoots out gelatinous blocks for Ratchet to bounce from.